Before Ada: A Forgotten Irish Female Mystery Mathematical Prodigy

Extract from a letter from William Molyneux to Edmond Halley (of Halley’s Comet fame), 6 April 1685, about goings on at the Dublin Philosophical Society:

“[S]everal of our meetings have been employed by a young mathematical female in this place, bred up by one Mr Tollet, a teacher of mathematics, and a most excellent learned man in that kind. The child is not yet eleven, and yet she hath given sufficient proofs of her learning in arithmetic, the most abstruse parts, algebra, geometry, trigonometry plane and spherical, the doctrine of the globes, chronology, and on the violin plays anything almost at sight.”

The ‘Mr Tollet’ referred to is the mathematician George Tollet, who later moved to England.   The girl is too old to be one of Tollet’s daughters by his wife Elizabeth Oakes. Perhaps she was his natural daughter, or maybe someone else’s child whom he took in and trained.  No subsequent record of her subsists.  The letter does go on to say that although very good at all these learned things, she was no more interested in them than other children of her age.   An unwilling pupil, perhaps?

I wonder what happened to her. Possibly, she died.  Or got fed up of being exhibited to bewigged scientific gentlemen like a prize pig at an agricultural fair, valued only for her brains and not for her tender and loving little heart?  Or tired of the caged tedium of constant study, with a whole world outside to explore, and the sum of people in it a far more interesting equation than anything the grey-slated world of algebra could conjure up?

Or simply discovered boys?

Ada Lovelace?

Larks on Grafton Street, 1876

From the Irish Times, Thursday, September 7th, 1876:-

Alas, no more is known about James Daly and his theatrical endeavours.  It seems he never again appeared in Grafton Street in female dress, or, if he did, his disguise must have been more convincing.  Personating a woman was just a misdemeanour, usually let off with a warning; if you got caught too many times, though, you might end up being prosecuted for buggery like Frederick William Parks, the ‘Fanny’ of the famous ‘Stella and Fanny’ trial involving two London youths, photo above.

I can’t find a photo of James Daly,  so I can’t say whether he made a, for want of a better word, striking woman, like Mr Parks, or a convincingly pretty one, like Mr Parks’ co-accused Ernest Boulton (‘Stella’), photo below.

Despite the Parks/Boulton buggery trial having taken place to much kerfuffle in 1870, only a few years previously, the judge in Mr Daly’s case appears to have been more concerned with theft than anything else.   A case of Irish tolerance or simply a refusal to recognise that a man might want to dress up in women’s clothes for reasons other than the commission of a felony… who knows?

Probably the most famous 19th century cross-dressers with an Irish connection were the American Russell brothers (pic below).  As with Mr Daly, the objection to them (most famously made in the heckling campaign initiated by the wonderfully named Society for the Prevention of the Ridiculous and Perversive Interpretation of the Irish Character) was not the cross-dressing, but that – unforgivable sin – they made fun of Irishwomen - the fact that they also raised their dresses on stage and performed rear-end kicks being merely venal in comparison..

Poor James Daly, though, with his nights in the cells and his tears in the dock.  I’m glad he cheered up by the end of the case.  I hope he didn’t suffer too much public opprobrium as a result.  The dress was probably ruined, too.

More about Fanny and Stella here, and the Russell brothers here.

Worth Waiting For

A collection of documents from the Irish auction house Adams, relating to the Fenian John Devoy, including a photograph of Mrs Elizabeth Kilmurray (formerly Kenny), and another from Devoy with the following inscription:-

‘To Mrs. E. Killmurray, nee Eliza Kenny, in loving memory of our engagement when she was a fine girl of 20 (1866) and with deep regret at the misfortunes which separated us.”

Devoy (who was a fine felon of a  man himself, see photograph below) and Miss Kenny were engaged when, in 1866,  he was sentenced to fifteen years’ penal servitude in England.   Subsequently false rumours of her marriage to another, or possibly her death (accounts vary) caused him to cease contact; tragically, the rumours had confused her with her sister.  Twelve years later, she eventually married; he didn’t; in old age they met again, and he wrote the inscription above…

Did Devoy really believe Miss Kenny was married, or dead? In the latter case, for instance, why no letter of condolence to her family?  Why no attempt to seek her grave on his return to Ireland in 1879, if not before?  Before leaving to serve his sentence, he had offered to release her from her engagement, and she refused, but what else could a girl do, in the circumstances?  Guilty about consigning her to potential years of spinsterhood, he may well have decided that the kindest thing was simply to cease contact, allowing her to marry another without any stigma of disloyalty attaching, the cost of this noble gesture painfully underlined by his subsequent long lonely life ending in a heavily-bearded death unmarried…

Or, alternatively, he may just have been a bachelor at heart.    Or even, perhaps, unlikely though it may seem, genuinely mistaken.  Devoy was a clever man, but sometimes clever men can be oddly simple where women are concerned…

And as for Miss Kenny?  Well now.  There lies the blame. In fairness, twelve years (some say seventeen, some even say nineteen) was a long time to wait without a letter, but it has to be said, it was her own fault.  I appreciate that communication with political prisoners was not the easiest, but an ingenious woman can always find ways and means.  If a girl doesn’t take the trouble to remind her fiance that she’s alive, what does she expect?

More about John Devoy here.   Link to the Adams auction page here.

Dublin Spring

A post in honour of our annual vernal promise of a glorious summer, unfulfilled nine years out of ten, the tease…

Paintings by Fergus O’Ryan and Henry Healy, recently on auction at adams.ie…

Counterfactual Dublin: Ernest Lee’s Science and Art Museum

This 1883 design by Ernest Lee was one of the unsuccessful entrants in a competition to design premises for the new Science and Art Museum, established by statute in 1877 so that ‘the people of Ireland would obtain the fullest opportunity of improvement in the cultivation of industrial and decorative arts’; a competition which ended in embarrassment when it was discovered that most of the entrants were English architects.

The museum and the alternative premises subsequently chosen to contain it at Kildare Street (picture below, designed by Cork architect Thomas Newenham Deane) became what we now know as the National Museum.

Lee’s submission, though impressive, is a bit of a mid-Victorian pile; Deane’s design, with its lovely felicity of angles and curves, is much more delicate, striking, and unique.

More about the history of the National Museum here.  An alternative design, and some information  about the ill-fated competition, from Archiseek, here.

Ireland’s Most Disreputable Barrister Ever?

There are probably a lot of candidates for this title, but in my humble opinion it goes to John Clavell above, called to the Irish Bar in November 1635, shortly after his marriage to a Dublin heiress, Isabel Markham.

Clavell’s criminal career began at university, when his college expelled him for stealing plate; subsequently he became a highwayman, and was sentenced to death, something he complained indignantly about in these lines below, written while awaiting execution.

“I That have Robb’d so oft, am now bid Stand, Death, and the Law assault me,and demand my Life, and meanes; I never us\d men so, but having ta’ne their money, let them goe.’

The verse, or perhaps the general amnesty awarded to criminals to mark the coronation of Charles I, worked;  Clavell was pardoned, and released from prison.   After his subsequent marriage, which presumably eased his financial problems, he appears to have led a relatively quiet life practising as a barrister and physician in Dublin until his death from pleurisy eight years later.  There were no reported children of the union; possibly a good thing since the bride was only nine years old at the time of the wedding.

Clavell is best remembered today for his literary endeavours: a forgotten and forgettable but most brilliantly-named play ‘The Soddered Citizen’ and a post-release poem  ‘A Recantation of an Ill-Led Life’, described by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as

“morally edifying expression of repentance [and] an exposé of a fascinating corner of the criminal underworld… [aiming] both to dissuade youth tempted by the supposed romance and gallantry of the highwayman and to teach the wary traveller to recognize the highwayman’s modus operandi and thus avoid his unwelcome attentions”

Sadly, ‘The Soddered Citizen’ has not yet made it online, but you can read salient extracts from the Recantation, or ‘A discouerie of the high-way law with vehement disswasions to all (in that kind) offenders : as also many cautelous admonitions and full instructions, how to know, shun, and apprehend a theefe : most necessarie for all honest trauellers to per’use, obserue and practise’ here.

Dublin Photos, 1900s

Just a few photos of 1900s Dublin, from ebay.com.

The first one below, with penny-farthing, is my favorite, but the elegant lounging Phoenix Park gentlemen and the Marlborough Street streetlamp are looking pretty good too.  Or were, once.

Nothing like looking at photographs like these, with all they tell us about the inevitable transience of life, to put things in perspective…